Report on Inequalities and Social Cohesion in Kenya: Evidence and Policy Implications

Abstract

Socio-economic development of a country involves successful interventions that improve, just the incomes of the population, but also the various widely accepted dimensions of human welfare, such as child and maternal survival and access to basic needs (food, shelter and education). Critically, such welfare improvements should occur across the whole country to enable national welfare averages to also improve. A national government is therefore obliged to ensure the delivery of the services that affect the performance of human welfare across the whole country. While nature often conspires to endow regions within countries differently - such as agro-climatically, a core responsibility of a national government is to distribute its resources in a way that diminishes the impacts of the disparities endowed by nature, to the extent that such disparities can differentiate human welfare attainments across the country. The need to pay attention to resource distribution is heightened in countries where livelihoods are dominated by primary production, as opposed to services or manufacturing. The ineffective management of accumulated resources differentially undermines people access to private goods, quasi-public goods and pure public goods. This perpetuates, and in instances, exacerbates nature-endowed inequalities. Consequently, citizen perceptions and the realities of unequal treatment by the government, and perceptions and realities of unequal welfare outcomes, undermine national cohesion and integration. In turn, this undermines a flagship project of many developing countries, the transformation of the multi-ethnic territorial state inherited from colonialism into a viable nation state.